Devarim 21:1-8 records a set of rituals that are to take place, the eglah arufa ceremony, if a corpse, which was presumed to have been murdered, was found in the field but the killer is unknown. The ceremony involves actions by the elders, judges and the priests, and the killing (decapitating) of a heifer in or near a wadi. Note, it is not clear if 21:9 is part of the ceremony or a charge of Moshe to the people when he was relating to them the laws of the eglah arufa ceremony.
What is the reason for this ceremony? 21:8 refers to the some of the participants of the ceremony asking for kapparah for the Jewish people, but kapparah for what? Also, why was the ceremony only done if the corpse was found in a field and not in the city?
One approach to understanding the eglah arufa ceremony is that it is to "neutralize" the effect of the murder on the land, see Patai 1939, Milgrom 1971, and maybe the Ramban on 21:5-8. Bemidbar 35:33 records that murder defiles the land, and that the land needs to be atoned when there is a murder. Bemidbar 35:33 also records that the atonement of the land is supposed to result from punishing the murderer, but in this case the murderer is unknown so according to the adherents of this approach the ceremony is a replacement to bring atonement to the land, the kapparah referred to in 21:8. Yet, with this rationale, the ceremony should also have been required if the corpse was found in the ground in a city or town, which probably is more likely than finding a dead body in the field since more people live in cities and towns, though maybe in antiquity more people lived in the country.
A second approach is that the local authorities have a responsibility to ensure the safety of the public and in this case they failed. Rashi (on 21:7), quoting from the Talmud Sotah 45b, writes that the local authorities might have been indirectly responsible for the death of the person since maybe they let the victim leave their city without an escort. For this failure to provide public security, the local authorities and the public as a whole need atonement, kapparah, and this explains why the elders, the judges and the priests are involved in the ceremony.
The approach can explain some of the details of the ceremony. 21:3,4 record that the heifer that is killed had never worked, and that the ceremony takes place by a wadi which had never been tilled or could not be tilled afterwards, which emphasizes the loss of life due to the murder, see Rashi on 21:4. The seeing of the dead heifer and the wadi by the local authorities and the priests might make them aware of their failure in not maintaining public security. Maybe one can then claim that this ceremony was only done for a murder in the fields since in the city the local authorities would take responsibility to provide public security, but they might be tempted to shirk responsibility for people outside of their jurisdiction. Yet, can one really fault the elders for not escorting the victim, does every person who leaves a city need an escort? Can local authorities protect every person from being killed?
The Rambam (Moreh, 3:40) suggests a third approach that the ceremony was in order to help catch the murderer. He writes, “there will be many stories and discussions among the people because of the investigation, the going-forth of the elders, the measurements, and the fact that the heifer is brought there.” The talk will lead to the discovery of the murderer. Furthermore, since the land where the heifer was to be killed could never be used, the owner of the land would make every possible effort to ensure that the murderer is caught. I do not understand this last point since I understand that the heifer was killed in a deserted area. It would seem to me that doing the ceremony in the land of a person unconnected with the crime would be stealing, see our discussion on 21:4, "The eglah arufah ceremony: A wadi in the land of Israel."
With this approach the prayer for kapparah in 21:8 would be for the local authorities and the people who did not find the murderer. A possible proof for this idea is that 21:9, whether it was part of the ceremony or not, stresses the importance of purging the innocent blood shed, which means to punish the murderer, see 19:13. (The Jerusalem Talmud, Sotah 9:6, suggests that maybe the guilt of the local authorities is that they let the murderer go free and failed to punish him, though this seems to be a very low probability event.)
N. Leibowitz (1980a, pp. 201-208, see also Ramban on 21:5-8, and Abravanel 1999, p. 324) rejects the Rambam’s suggestion since she doubts that “all this elaborate ritual was designed merely as a device for detecting the murderer.” Yet, it could be that the killing of the heifer was a sign for the penalty the murderer was supposed to receive (Driver, 1902, p. 242), and the fact that heifer had never been worked highlights the innocent blood that was shed, as by the second approach. Also, the going to a wadi in a deserted area would make the ceremony more burdensome for the local authorities, which would give them an incentive to work hard to catch the murderer to avoid having to do the ceremony. Furthermore, it could be that for the Rambam the crucial issue is the ceremony itself and not the details of the ceremony.
Would the ceremony really lead to that much more knowledge of the murderer? 21:1 implies that an investigation was done to find the murderer before proceeding with the ceremony (see Tigay 1996, p. 191, quoting Josephus, Antiquities 4.220). If the investigation failed it would be unlikely that the ceremony would produce more evidence. Yet, maybe it is important to mark an end to the investigation and then one can learn from the failures. If one just allows an investigation to drift off, then there is no accounting for how to improve an investigation for the next murder. According to this idea, could one claim that a murder investigation in a city never ends and/or is usually fully investigated, while by a murder in a field where nobody lives, there is barely any investigation at all. Accordingly, the eglah arufa ceremony was by the finding of the corpse in the field to increase the incentive to have an investigation and to help find the murderer in this case and other cases.
A different idea is that it is well known that if one repeats a ceremony even if it is meaningful, too many times, the ceremony loses its specialness, and people become annoyed with the ceremony. Maybe the same idea is relevant here. Really, the ceremony is appropriate wherever the body is found, but if it is done in every case where a murder is unknown, then the ceremony will lose its impact. Just doing the ceremony when a corpse is found in the field makes the ceremony a unique event, which will impart the participants with a greater sense of responsibility. With this idea, the prayer of 21:8 (and 21:9?) that the Jewish people should be forgiven would not be just for the corpse found in the field that necessitated the ceremony, but for all cases of unsolved murders. This idea would only be relevant to the second and third approaches, as with the first approach even if the ceremony had no meaning to the people involved still the land “needs” the ceremony to attain kapparah.
A historical curiosity of the eglah arufa ceremony is that the Mishnah (Sotah 9:9) writes that the ceremony was discontinued when there were many murderers in the country. Yet, one would think that specifically when there were many murders, then the ceremony was more crucial. The Rambam (Laws of murder and preservation of life, 9:12) seems to explain that when there were many murders, then there was always somebody who had information about the murder, and the ceremony was not done even if there was just one witness to the event. Yet, even if the ceremony was not done when there existed one witness, still the ceremony should still occur when there is no known witness because if this is not true, then the ceremony could never have occurred since one could always say maybe there is some witness out there. Instead, maybe the idea is that when there were many murders, there were many unsolved murders, and then the ceremony became too frequent and lost its effect, so Chazal discontinued the ceremony.
Bibliography:
Abarbanel, Yitzhak (1437-1508), 1999, Commentary on Devarim, Jerusalem: Horev Publishing
Driver, Samuel Rolles, 1902, A critical and exegetical commentary on Deuteronomy, third edition, Edinburgh: T & T Clark.
Leibowitz, Nehama (1905-1997), 1980a, Studies in Devarim, translated and adapted by Aryeh Newman, Jerusalem: The World Zionist Organization.
Milgrom, Jacob, 1971, Eglah Arufah, in Encyclopedia Judaica, Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, Vol. 6, pp. 475-477.
Patai Raphael, 1939, The 'egla 'arufa or the expiation of the polluted land, Jewish Quarterly Review, 30, pp. 59-69.
Tigay, Jeffrey H. 1996, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society
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